After Stone arrest, is Mueller probe targeting Austin's Alex Jones?

Jonathan Tilove @JTiloveTX

Friday

Jan 25, 2019 at 6:01 PMJan 25, 2019 at 9:32 PM

"Alex, I can say I've had better moments, better mornings."

With that, Roger Stone, the latest target of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, began an exclusive interview Friday morning with Alex Jones, the Austin-based conspiracy theorist who was in the middle of the biggest story in the country.

Stone works for Jones, helped elect President Donald Trump and introduced Trump to Jones to their mutual benefit.

"This is the most epic thing I've ever been involved in," Jones said.

It was Stone's first interview after his predawn arrest by what looked like more than two dozen FBI agents accompanied by a CNN camera crew at his Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home.

He was fingerprinted at an FBI processing facility in Miami-Dade County, and then, shackled, made an appearance before a federal judge, unshackled and released on $250,000 bond. He had been indicted on seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering.

Stone appeared on InfoWars before leaving the courthouse, thrusting his arms in his hero Richard Nixon's classic “V for Victory” salute and confronting the ravenous waiting mob of news media that Jones, watching from his Austin studio, sized up as larger than any press conference he had ever seen — "bigger than O.J."

"There must be 500 or 600 reporters out there, but I am exclusive on InfoWars," said Stone, who opened his press conference by invoking perhaps the most fundamental of what he calls Stone's Rules: “Well, as I have always said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

"It was meant to intimidate me, but I am not intimidated," Stone said of his cinematic arrest. Stone had texted Jones on Thursday suggesting he thought his arrest was imminent.

"He told me last night that he thought they were coming in for the kill," Jones said.

Trump connection

Stone, who in 2013 wrote a book alleging that Lyndon B. Johnson killed John F. Kennedy, first met Jones in passing at a JFK assassination conference in Dallas. But Stone didn’t really get to know him until he appeared on Jones’ show in November 2015, while in Austin to talk about “The Clintons’ War on Women,” written with Austin’s Robert Morrow, that became a playbook for the Trump campaign in figuring out how to fight back against charges against Trump about his alleged mistreatment of women

After his own appearance on InfoWars boosted his book sales, Stone arranged for Trump to do a remote video interview that December with Jones. Stone realized it was a perfect political marriage. Jones' vast audience was ripe for a candidate like Trump, and Jones and Trump shared a mutually confirming, conspiratorial, populist, anti-globalist turn of mind. InfoWars became a bullhorn for the Trump campaign and, when Trump won, there was Stone in Austin with Jones for election night coverage and a champagne toast.

Jones became President Trump's biggest, loudest booster, and Stone ended up becoming a daily InfoWars regular — Yoda to Jones' Luke Skywalker — and a source for some actual White House inside info.

Stone usually broadcasts from a Florida InfoWars studio near his home, and Stone told Jones the FBI agents who raided his home told him they wanted to search the studio. "I gave them the key because I didn't want them breaking the door down," Stone said.

"There's nothing there to find," Stone said. "The irony is that they already have what they are looking for."

But Stone likes from time to time to come to the home office in Austin and broadcast from Jones' South Austin studio. He filled in for Jones on air during Jones' child custody trial.

Now, Stone told Jones, "If I want to come to Austin, which I do, I will have to get their permission, but my lawyers think that is doable." On the plus side, he said, "There's no press gag" order.

Jones told Stone that he thinks he and InfoWars might be next on Mueller's target list.

Hush money?

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Jerome Corsi — a former Stone associate and former InfoWars Washington bureau chief, whose testimony before the Mueller grand jury reportedly undercut Stone's version of events on WikiLeaks’ release of information on the Clinton campaign at the center of the special counsel's inquiry — has been collecting $15,000-a-month payments from InfoWars, even since he left the job back in June, with Mueller’s team “exploring whether the payments were made to ensure that Corsi would offer investigators a version of events favorable to Stone.”

"I have my phone ringing off the hook, `Did you make the hush money, are you going to prison?'" Jones said. "So now employing people and then giving them severance pay when it’s in their contract because that’s what he wanted to work here, he made a pretty good deal for himself, but I had to let him go because I didn’t like his writing, or just wasn't accurate."

"Corsi now admits that, OK, it was severance pay," Jones said. "Earlier he was saying, actually it was something else, but they're now moving on to me and my father and my Spidey sense tells me that they mean to move on to us to take InfoWars out and to take any support for the president out because we got President Trump elected."

Both Stone and Jones pleaded with listeners for money Friday.

Stone said that his lawyer say his defense will cost $2 million — he asked for contributions to stonedefensefund.com — and that he is struggling just to pay his rent.

He said he had lost his life and health insurance, sold his car, cashed out a small account he had from book sales and had no stocks or bonds.

"You guys have kept me alive," he said of his salary from InfoWars.

Stone and especially Jones have found themselves thrown off social media platforms in the last year.

Jones said InfoWars had been taking in $45 million a years, "and we'll be lucky if it's $30 million this year."

"I'm going to have to start laying people off," Jones said.

"I make about $2 million a year and I pay it all to lawyers after taxes," said Jones, referring to the expense of fending off defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress lawsuits brought in Austin and elsewhere against him for, among other things, Infowars' coverage of the 2012 massacre of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, as a hoax.

"These Sandy Hook lawsuits are just a tactic to dig into your personal finances, the finances of InfoWars," Tyler Nixon, an attorney for Stone, told Jones during an on-air appearance Friday.

"We need to be flooded with money," Jones told listeners, hawking everything from his array of dietary supplements to the InfoWars store's new Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "Capitalists-walk-their-dogs/Socialists-eat-them" shirts featuring a cartoon of the new left-wing New York City congresswoman as a dog.

"I came up with this little baby," Jones said. "This is triggering. This is powerful."

Throughout Friday's broadcast, Stone, though the one under considerably greater stress, was, per usual, the calmer presence.

Jones pressed hard on the narrative that Stone had been silenced by heckling reporters at his appearance outside the Florida courthouse.

"Well they tried," Stone told Jones, essentially a gentle correction, because while there were boos and chants of "lock him up" from the crowd that swelled around the reporters at the scene, Stone was able to speak and be heard by the national audience tuning in.

As Jones later told Nixon of his relationship with Stone, "Roger's always telling me, `Don't say that. That's not really true.' Even though I'm not lying."

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